To keep the examples in this book simple and to focus on the automation code being written, we have made use of the simple inifile format of inventory that Ansible supports. However, Ansible can ingest inventory data in JSON format, which can be passed to it by any executable script.
Almost every Linux machine these days will exist within some ecosystem, be it a public cloud provider such as AWS or Azure, a private cloud environment such as OpenStack, or a traditional virtualization environment such as VMware or oVirt. All of these systems already know what their inventory is, although they do not use that term as such. For example, if you run a set of Linux virtual machines in Amazon EC2 or OpenStack, ...
